She Didn't Mean to Kill Him, or Did She? A Scandal Revisited

BEFORE O. J. Simpson, there was Jean Harris. Before the South Beach Diet, there was "The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet."

On March 10, 1980, the headmistress of a fancy girls' school in Virginia drove to Purchase, N.Y., and shot and killed her lover. And no celebrity trial since then has matched that scandal -- nothing trumps a woman scorned by a philandering diet doctor.

The ill-fated affair of Jean S. Harris and Dr. Herman Tarnower might normally be the stuff of a Lifetime television movie, but "Mrs. Harris" was made by HBO. The film, which runs on Saturday, revels in the tale's absurdity as much as its pathos. Almost as a warning label for viewers expecting a two-hankie weep, the film opens with a torchy rendition of "Put the Blame on Mame" over a playful montage of B-movie heroines shooting their men -- Joan Crawford, Louise Brooks and, of course, Gloria Swanson in "Sunset Boulevard."

At the time of the murder, the Jean Harris story was seen by many as a cautionary tale -- an example of how even the most educated and well-bred women can lose their bearings, and minds, over a man. Diana Trilling and Shana Alexander each wrote a book about the case. Ms. Alexander's biography, "Very Much a Lady: The Untold Story of Jean Harris and Dr. Herman Tarnower," was highly sympathetic to its subject, of whom the author once said, "she reminds me of me."

This screenplay, written by the film's director, Phyllis Nagy, is based on Ms. Alexander's biography, but only up to a point. More than 25 years later, "Mrs. Harris" takes a knowing and, at times, satirical look at preppy, middle-aged passion. It's less a melodrama than social anthropology with attitude.

The casting is a tell. Mrs. Harris is played by Annette Bening, an actress with a gift for tapping into a character's core astringency; even at her most emotionally unraveled and pathetic, Mrs. Harris is riddled with snobbery and self-delusion. After being taken into custody, Mrs. Harris is close to hysterics, and believes that she only wounded her lover. A detective takes pity on her and lets her know that Dr. Tarnower has "passed on," as he put it. "What a ridiculous expression," Mrs. Harris snaps.

Later, she moans to a friend that she cannot fathom how something so "ugly and sad" could happen between two people who never argue, "except over the use of the subjunctive."

Actually, they argued a lot. Ben Kingsley's Dr. Tarnower is selfish, narcissistic, cruel and also quite strange. His accent is stilted in an effort to erase traces of his Brooklyn Jewish background. According to Ms. Alexander's book, Dr. Tarnower tried to remove "the tones of Flatbush and Borough Park as if they were audible crab grass." He chooses the pretty, proper divorcée from Grosse Pointe, Mich., as his "shiksa" trophy, someone he can show off to his socialite friends -- sometimes literally in his trophy room.

In this version, Mrs. Harris, at times appealing, at other times brittle and censorious, is hard to fathom. A career woman raising two sons, she falls for Dr. Tarnower's bullying charm at first sight. But even their first sexual experience is demeaning ("Don't you want to see me?" she asks when he orders her to turn off the light. "No," he replies.)

Mrs. Harris is a headmistress at work but only one of many mistresses in play at the Tarnower residence. She stays with the cardiologist even after he retracts a marriage proposal, and also after he begins an open affair with a younger woman, Lynne Tryforos (Chloe Sevigny). Mrs. Harris is addicted to him -- as well as the sleeping pills and speed he prescribes for her. As their relationship matures and sours, she grows increasingly depressed and strung out.

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In her biography, Ms. Alexander ascribes Mrs. Harris's masochistic attachment to Dr. Tarnower to a childhood warped by a cold, tyrannical father. The film doesn't make those connections, leaving it to the viewer to puzzle out their strange relationship.

The story begins with the night of the shooting, shown first the way Mrs. Harris described it to the police, as a suicide attempt that went awry. Toward the end, the same scene is played out from the prosecutor's point of view, which turned out to be more plausible to the jury: Mrs. Harris was convicted and given a sentence of 15 years to life at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She was granted clemency and released in 1993.

The narrative shifts back and forth from the shooting, the trial and flashbacks of the couple in happier and also more miserable times. (By the time she became the head of the Madeira School in 1977, his interest had faded to bored incivility.) There are cutaways to friends and other witnesses who speak to the camera about the case -- cameos by Dr. Tarnower's sister (Cloris Leachman), former girlfriends and men friends. And also some students.

One day, Mrs. Harris becomes enraged when she sees orange peels scattered on school grounds, ("They are pigs, Carol," she tells her assistant while on her hands and knees on the lawn. "I don't care how many National Merit scholars we have.") She then bans all oranges from campus. A former student says, "I think litter made her madder than drinking or drugs or not wearing bras."

Soon after that, Mrs. Harris grabs her purse, a gun and a bouquet of daisies, and drives five hours in a rainstorm to her lover's bedroom.

A Madeira school motto is "function in disaster, finish in style." The heroine of "Mrs. Harris" got it backward -- she functioned with style and finished in disaster.